Category: Syriac

Nestorius, The Bazaar of Heracleides — now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I hope that I may be forgiven for a small announcement.  Nestorius wrote in exile in his own defence.  Since his books were ordered to  be burned, and his name used in much the same way as moderns use accusations of ‘racist’ — to shut down discussion — he was obliged to circulate it under the name of Heracleides of Damas.  It’s quite hard going, but since it has survived to our own day, people may like to know that the English translation is now online here.  I have also translated some material about the manuscript find from the French edition and translation.
In some ways the story is familiar.  A single manuscript had survived.  A copy was taken “in secret”, since the owner clearly didn’t want copies made.  The single manuscript was, it turns out, destroyed in WW1.  Fortunately the owner’s wish to prevent copying did not lead to the loss of the text.  Other texts extant in Syriac in 1914 were not so lucky, as I have remarked before.  But what is it about people who own manuscripts that makes them so desperate to prevent the text circulating?
Share

Editing old translations

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
A little while ago, I scanned the 1882 English translation made by William Wright of the Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite.  The text is of great interest, recording the war between the Romans and the Sassanid Persians in the reign of Anastasius I ca 507 AD, and written from the perspective of a resident of Edessa.  Those who wish to read it will find it here.  

But there was a problem.  The translator had chosen to render the Syriac term for the Eastern Romans, ‘Rom’ as ‘Greeks’.  This makes sense in 1300; does it make sense in 500?  He had also rendered the name of the city of Edessa as ‘Urhay’, which is the name of the modern town on the ruins of Edessa; and Amida as ‘Diyarbekir’ (where the bombing took place recently, where there is a substantial library of Syriac texts, and where there is also, I believe, a US airbase).  Again, do these names make sense at this period?  Finally there was the usual profusion of Jacobean English: “what befel”, “thou”, etc, which the reader must mentally translate as he goes.  The footnotes were studded with Syriac, which I could not sensibly transcribe, so much had to be changed to put the text online.

What should we do?  There is always a case for leaving the text alone, and this is the course that I normally prefer.  But in this case I chose otherwise; I fixed all three of these things.  Was I right to do so?

Share

Syriac text of Eusebius “On the star” now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
There are few Syriac texts online in electronic form, so I thought that I would highlight that Fr. Mathew Koshy Modisseril has kindly typed in the text of Eusebius of Caesarea “On the star” from the text printed in the “Journal of Sacred Literature”.  It’s available here, and the English text from here.  Users of Windows XP will find that they already have the Estrangelo Edessa font needed; others may need to download the Meltho unicode fonts. 

Part of one page of the unique manuscript was erased, though.

The text is public domain, so help yourselves and do whatever you like with it.

Share

Programming Right-to-Left Syriac Unicode text on Windows

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
For some time I have been trying to write a program on Windows XP which would help me work with Syriac text.  It has been quite a dreadful experience, and I am barely started!  The problem is finding out how to get one text box in my application to handle text as Right-to-Left Syriac, both display and text entry, while allowing the rest of the application to work as normal.  In case anyone else out there is struggling, I have written some notes on how to do it, now I have finally worked out the problem!

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/RightToLeft_Syriac/right_to_left.htm

The same would apply to any RTL language, such as Hebrew and Arabic.  Is Ethiopic RTL, I wonder?

Share

A.G. still being used in 1900 in Iraq

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I wonder how many people know that the Seleucid era (Anno Graecorum=Year of the Greeks) was still being used in 1900? I’m reading through the English translation of Nestorius, “The Bazaar of Heracleides“, at the moment, and came across this footnote on p.192: 

2 The Syriac copyist has here added a note to the following effect: ‘From here twelve pages have been torn out and lost from the original by the troops of Bedr Khan Bey, when they captured the district of Das in the year 2154 of the Greeks (= A. D. 1843).’

The Syriac copyist in question must be a modern scribe writing one of the handwritten copies made ca. 1900 of the unique 11th century manuscript, since the editor only had access to these copies. The 11th century ms. was damaged but fortunately not destroyed by the Kurds when they massacred 10,000 Nestorian Christians in 1843.  It appears to have been destroyed altogether during WW1.

Share

Alqosh monastery bombed?

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
This link, written in 2004, describes damage to the Christian churches at Kurdish hands in Iraq.  It mentions “Rabban Hormizd, the ancient stone monastery outside Alqosh on the Nineveh plain which was bombed so severely that many of its magnificent epigraphic memorials, dating from a hundred centuries ago, have been shattered. These memorials were some of the most precious classical Syriac stone carvings in the world. They lie in a makeshift museum in Alqosh in desperate need of restoration.” Addai Scher catalogued the books at this monastery, also known as Notre-Dame des Semences.  Some at least of these were taken to Baghdad, to the Chaldean Patriarchate (since bombed by the insurgents).  Those are apparently safe.  It all highlights the need to photograph manuscripts urgently; no-one in 1950 would have expected that we would be losing manuscripts like this in 2006!
Share

More on the lost library of Seert

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
Addai ScherI have referred before to the library at the Chaldean archbishop’s residence at Séert.  Even copies of the catalogue of manuscripts made by Addai Scher in 1905 seem scarce.  Here in the UK a copy is listed in the British Library, but this is useless to most people.  Yesterday I looked at the copy in Cambridge University Library, which turned out to be an incomplete and grotty photocopy of the BL one.  I admit that I mourned over codex 88, containing the only copy in the world of Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Incarnation.  J. Quasten in the third volume of his Patrology states that among his works, “no other work was so often referenced” during the 5th century disputes.

I’ve been trying to pin down data about the loss of the library.  I’ve found online a book from 1920 in English which gives eyewitness accounts of how the scholar Addai Scher (left) died, after fleeing his residence with the aid of a sympathetic Turkish officer, he was caught, “looking pale and emaciated”, beaten up by Kurdish irregulars, and then shot several times.  Elsewhere the account refers to books being looted from other sites.

This leads to an interesting question: do we know for a fact that these volumes are not to be found somewhere in Kurdistan?  A couple of weeks ago I heard from someone who named himself a Kurd, proferring a bible manuscript, “written on skin”.  The invitation sounded like a con.  George Kiraz recounts how a DVD of images of a manuscript, on black parchment (!) and containing a mixture of crude Syriac and Arabic lettering, was being touted around bishops in Eastern Turkey, so clearly someone has realised that there is a market. 

But who are these people?  And, more seriously: what books exist in Kurdistan?  Saddam Hussein had a collection of manuscripts before his fall, which included Arabic and Kurdish mss.  Is there work to be done, to determine what actually exists out there?

Share

Getting a copy of a Syriac scientific manuscript

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I have found that the French National Library want $130 for a duplicate of a monochrome microfilm and putting it onto CDROM.  Am I the only one rather astonished at the prices that are being charged these days for low quality stuff?
Share

BNF catalogues of manuscripts all online

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I find that the Bibliotheque Nationale Francaise (French National Library) in Paris have scanned most of their catalogues in PDF form and made them available for free download.  The intention, clearly, is to do the lot.  Thus Zotenberg’s catalogue of Syriac and Mandean mss is online, as is the more recent supplement.  The catalogues can be found at:

http://www.bnf.fr/pages/zNavigat/frame/catalogues_num.htm

I’ve been browsing through the catalogue of Arabic mss.  As one might expect, the contents are mainly derived from Coptic or Maronite texts.  But what a treasure!  Sadly we need not ask whether other major libraries have done the same.

Share

Nestorius again

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA
I have been following up the story of the manuscript of the “Dialogue with Heracleides” by Nestorius.  The consensus seems to be that the single manuscript was damaged in the 19the century during Turkish-led massacres of Christians.  It was discovered late in that century, and several hand-written copies made, including one for the library of the American missionaries at Urmiah, one for Cambridge (presumably the university library) and another.  

But the original has perished, destroyed during the First World War during massacres by Turkish troops (again).

All this highlights the fragility of manuscripts, and the importance of photographing the things whenever possible.  And it really is possible!  Cheap airflights make all sorts of ventures possible.

Last year I did a day-trip to the Rhineland.  I got a budget flight from London Stansted airport (about an hour from where I live) to Frankfurt-Hahn airport.  Hahn is nowhere near Frankfurt, and is a converted American airbase, about 10 miles from Bernkastel-Kues.  I hired a car at the airport and drove there, photographed a manuscript at the Stiftsbibliothek, and returned the same day.  It was a long and weary day, but very possible.

Early this year I went even further, this time flying to Salzburg and driving 100 miles east towards Vienna to a monastery named Seitenstetten, photographing a manuscript, and coming back the same day.  This was an 18-hour day, and middle age is not an asset here — as the day wore on I started to become uncomfortably conscious that I have an uncle who suffered a heart-attack and was never the same again after doing an 18-hour day of unaccustomed exertion!  But it all shows what can be done. 

Share